Our politics must allow us to disagree peacefully

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"Some people want to call him a left wing, right wing, or no wing. He's a murderer."

That is a characterization I heard from a politician of the homegrown terrorist who slaughtered nine people in a church in Charleston. Murderer, sure, but there is so much emptiness and evasion in the rest of that sentence.

There is a temptation to disown this killer to the point that he would exist in his own box, with no connection to any brand of ideas. But there is a false comfort in failing to call a man what his own words and views make him out to be.

I don't shrink from calling the mass murder in Charleston a product of hate-warped ideological extremism, and I don't run from saying that the killer was motivated by a dangerous worldview. The viewpoint is as half-baked and nonsensical as can be, but it is recognizable to the FBI and the Southern Poverty Law Center as a zone that exists in the dark reaches on the far right of American life. And this killer, while he acted alone, is not alone in his theories or his thoughts.

I've heard it said, including by this paper's Josh Moon last week, that to locate this man on a political spectrum could be construed as a slander of people who think of themselves as conservatives.

Yes, it is too true that the shorthand of partisan politics drives many liberals to call any conservative an extremist, but underserved name calling does not excuse the fact that a far-out, extreme, militant, paranoid right exists.

This far right does not value limited government, it values a limited humanity. It does not seek freedom, it seeks oppression. It is not craving a heritage, it is reaching back to the most un-American features of our past. In its passion for an America that no longer exists, it would renounce much of what makes America great. That far right is almost certainly not you, average reader, but you ought to know it is real and scary.

Recent history teaches us the left is just as dangerous when it enters "loonyland." When a murderer in New York assassinated two police officers because he was a fierce hater of the law and authority, he was correctly denounced as a left-wing zealot. The Charleston shooter will be his mirror image in hell, just from the other side of the political divide.

I wish we would all learn the language of humility. That means stop calling every conservative a vote-suppressing, intolerant, equality-denying creep; stop equating liberal with an America-hating, race-baiting, faithless sort of lesser being. Sometimes we just disagree.

But can we at least agree that neither far right nor far left is a space that will yield the common ground our country needs? Don't we want, whatever our politics, to be rooted in the American tradition and not on a left or right ledge? God help and fix America if that sounds too unreachable.